a return to a Nature-based religion and also to a religion of the Goddess. Wicca was to fulfil this longing. From the nineteenth century onwards, many thinking and spiritual people had grown to believe that society was declining because of an over-emphasis on the masculine at the expense of the feminine. They saw this imbalance as encouraged by monotheistic, male-based religious thinking which distorted the world-view of Western society. From the late eighteenth century onwards, rapid industrialization and the rape of Europe’s natural scenery and resources caused many people to feel that the time was out of joint; that common sense was being sacrificed to material progress with potentially disastrous results. This feeling increased after the horrors of the First World War.
Some found their religious answers in the East. An effect of the European countries’ urge for colonies was to create a continual traffic of ideas to and fro between Europe and Asia. Just as the Crusaders had returned from the East infected with heretical thoughts, so too did Europeans return with new religious visions. At the end of the first World War, the colonial magistrate Sir John Woodroffe writing under the name of Arthur Avalon published his influential book on Tantra and Goddess energy, Shakti and Shakta.7 In this, he called for a restoration of the equality of the sexes in outer society and a return to the worship of the Divine Mother and Divine Father. Sir John believed that all things were possible when the supreme personifications of the Divine were God and Goddess who:
… give and receive mutually, the feminine side being of equal importance with the masculine. On the knees of the Mother, as the author puts it: All quarrels about duality and nonduality are settled. When the Mother seats herself in the heart, then everything, be it stained or stainless, becomes but an ornament for her lotus feet.8
The call for a return to a Pagan religion was woven into literature for public consumption by writers such as Dion Fortune, whose novels described the religion of the Great Goddess and Horned God. Dion Fortune appealed to the Horned God:
Shepherd of Goats, upon the wild hill’s way,
lead thy lost flock from darkness unto day.
Forgotten are the ways of sleep and night –
men seek for them, whose eyes have lost the light.
Open the door, the door which hath no key,
the door of dreams, whereby men come to thee.9
Although Leland’s Aradia hinted that Witches in Italy were worshipping the Goddess and still practising the Old Religion at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1950s that there was any indication that the Craft was being practised by organized covens in England. The tide changed with the initiation into Wicca of Gerald Brousseau Gardner. Gerald Gardner was a former colonial administrator who had been practising ritual magic, but this was not what he sought. He had experienced mystical visions of the Goddess and male-oriented ritual magic did not fulfil his religious longings. In the late 1930s, Gerald met the Witch Dorothy Clutterbuck through the Rosicrucian Theatre. Despite her quaint English surname, Dorothy Clutterbuck, or Old Dorothy as she was known, was not a traditional village Witch. She was a wealthy lady who lived in the south-coast seaside town of Bournemouth, which is close to the New Forest, an area with long associations with the Craft. Dorothy Clutterbuck had been born in India in the days of the British Raj and it appeared that she never married, but returned at some point to England. Whether Dorothy Clutterbuck came from a Witch family herself or was able to join a coven as an outsider is not known, but in 1939 she was sufficiently senior to initiate Gerald Gardner. In Wicca, Gerald Gardner found what he sought – a Goddess-oriented religion which preserved the remnants of traditional village Wise-craft with the Pagan traditions of Europe’s past. Wicca also offered more. Its members were familiar with the Classical Pagan Mysteries, ritual magic, the Paganism of Greece and Rome, and, from their days in the Raj, they had a knowledge of Eastern traditions of Goddess worship and the use of etheric energy. This produced a dynamic cross-fertilization of ideas that transformed Wicca from a religion of the past, into a religion for the future.
Gerald Gardner had very different ideas from other Witches practising the Craft at that time. While they harked back to the persecutions of the past, believing that the Craft would best endure by remaining a secret and closed movement, Gerald believed that the Craft had the potential to fill what he saw would be the religious and spiritual needs of many in the generations to come. However, the Craft could only fulfil this role if enough information was published for people to know about its existence and for the persistent to access it. Like all religious visionaries, Gerald found that his enthusiasm for new ideas did not always find favour with his elders. Dorothy Clutterbuck was not keen on publicity, but two years before her death Gerald managed to give out some information under the guise of a novel, High Magic’s Aid.10 This was published in 1949 under his Latin Witch name of Scire, To Know.
Old Dorothy’s death in 1951 coincided with the repeal in Britain of the Witchcraft Act. Gerald now felt free to publish a non-fiction work and in 1954 Witchcraft Today11 appeared, the first account of modern-day Wicca. Margaret Murray wrote the introduction. Within the Craft there has often been speculation that Margaret Murray was herself a Witch, but in any event she was keen to support Gerald Gardner’s book and wrote that he had shown that Witchcraft was descended from ancient rituals and that it had nothing to do with evil practices. It was:
… the sincere expression of that feeling towards God which is expressed perhaps more decorously, though not more sincerely, by modern Christianity in church services. But the processional dances of the drunken Bacchantes, the wild prancings round the Holy Sepulchre as recorded by Maundrell at the end of the seventeenth century, the jumping dance of the medieval Witches, the solemn zikr of the Egyptian peasant, the whirling of the dancing dervishes, all have their origin in the desire to be ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, and to show by their actions that intense gratitude which the worshippers find themselves incapable of expressing in words.12
The religion of Wicca which emerged from Gerald Gardner’s books is a religion based on initiation into a Mystery tradition which practised rites based on the seasonal cycle, out of doors, often skyclad or in naturist fashion, using the Wise-craft of our ancestors and giving honour to the female Divine – the Goddess. Three major strands of belief and practice had merged: the Dionysian ecstatic and shamanistic practices of the Paganism of the woods and groves; the more Apollonian temple religions of later Paganism; and magic. In the twentieth century the word Witchcraft had come to mean not just a particular form of magic using incantations and spells, but a whole system of religious philosophy and belief. Wicca worked within groups called covens with three degrees of entry, but the degrees were marked by initiation rites which had been elaborated using concepts from the magical societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, who had themselves harked back to the rites of Isis and the Eleusian Mysteries when devising their ceremonies. The ancient idea of dancing in a circle to raise power was as old as the Stone Age and was a known Witch practice, but Witches did not traditionally use a magic circle cast with a sword. This concept had however merged into the Witchcraft tradition and circle dancing now took place in cast and consecrated circles with guardians at each of the four cardinal points. The use of magic and spells was still part of the tradition, but now these were set into a religious framework that stood halfway between the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of Paganism. The orgies that had appealed to our ancestors were not needed in an age which was moving towards greater sexual freedom in everyday life and where population control rather than fertility was the problem that faced society.
Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today was followed in 1959 by The Meaning of Witchcraft.13 On the premise that all publicity is good publicity, he decided to make himself available to the media. This resulted in the 1950s and 1960s in a spate of articles about Wicca that informed those whose religious and spiritual ideas were sympathetic of the continued existence of the Old Religion. Gradually people began to find their way to covens, not only those which Gerald was rapidly founding based on the New Forest tradition he had inherited, but also to other covens who were willing to accept outsiders.
Gardnerian Witches initiated by Gerald and his initiates have become one of the major branches